HEREND HAS BEEN KNOWN FOR ITS BRILLIANT WHITE PORCELAIN SINCE 1826. ON THE EVE OF THE HUNGARIAN MANUFACTORY’S 200TH ANNIVERSARY (YES, WE’RE A TAD EARLY), WE SALUTE HEREND’S GOLD AND WHITE DINNERWARE DESIGNS, IDEAL EXEMPLARS OF CLASSIC ELEGANCE.
HEREND IS KNOWN AROUND THE GLOBE AS ONE OF PORCELAIN’S finest producers, a favorite of royalty, aristocracy, and folks like you and me who appreciate unparalleled quality and exquisite craftsmanship. Herend’s smooth white ...
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It’s a formidable task, overseeing product development for all of Lenox’s flatware brands, which includes Lenox, Kate Spade, Oneida, Cambridge, Hampton Forge, Reed & Barton, and Gorham. Your tenures at Oneida and Bed Bath & Beyond, as the tabletop buyer, provide a solid foundation for this position.
Prior to Oneida, where I was senior product marketing manager when Lenox acquired us, I was at Bed Bath & Beyond for 12 years, most recently as the tabletop buyer. My whole ...
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How we can honor those that came before us in the retail industry.
March 2, 2023
The founder of Juan Pollo Chicken, Albert Okura, passed away last week at the age of 71. Mr. Okura envisioned Juan Pollo, a fast food chain with 25 locations in Southern California, as a household name that would someday sell the most chicken in the world. He believed in this so much that he bought the site of the original McDonald’s restaurant, located in San Bernardino, CA, in 1998—not to turn it into a Juan Pollo restaurant but rather into a museum to honor his fast food industry....
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How we can celebrate indie stores and promote sales by hosting a Save Local event.
February 23, 2023
When one thinks of shopping locally, some consider it an act of charity. One may pay more and get less selection. That’s not a recipe for success. In contrast, the world’s most successful retailers, Walmart and Amazon, operate on just the opposite principles: low prices and massive selection. When I’m in Walmart's Panama City Beach location, it’s so massive I feel like I’m in the Giants' stadium. Amazon sells 12m items on its website (350m if you count the third-...
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I was at the East Village restaurant Evil Katsu tonight and spotted this clever promotion. I think gift shops should have a sign like this, too, and offer free gift wrapping if the customer leaves a review.
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According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, 50% of businesses fail within five years of opening; fewer still make it to their 10th anniversary. So a company with legs surely must doing many things right, right? Not necessarily. Even if you’re providing a great product or service, the most important requisite to success lies in the customer experience. If customers feel ignored by your support team after having a bad experience with a product or service, they’ll shift for a ...
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How we can bring clients together to build a larger network.
February 4, 2023
Economist Bent Flyvbjerg encourages us to find our “Lego” in his new book “How Big Things Get Done.” Mr. Flyvbjerg, whose new book is reviewed by Ben Cohen in this week’s The Wall Street Journal, says that most large projects that are completed successfully use a modular approach. Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal:
“That’s the question every project leader should ask: What is the small thing we can assemble in large numbers into a big ...
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How having the right defaults makes decisions easier for clients and helps them be more successful.
January 27, 2023
When you look at your driver’s license, it lists if you’re an organ donor. Twenty years ago, only 20% of people were donors, but today 80% are—thereby saving millions of lives. Did people become more kind? No, the question on the application was changed from opt-in to opt-out. People signing up for or renewing a license are now by default enlisted in organ donation. Lesson: the right default answer in medical care can save millions of lives. Similarly, the right defaults ...
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Seasons greetings from the PNW everyone! I was out shopping today and came across a sign in the wild promoting Shop Local, a concept near and dear to us and something we have believed in from the inception of the company..helping support local businesses in a way that's beneficial to all. So much so that we began transitioning Bridge to ShopLocal earlier this year.
This particular sign was in a mall similar to one that you may have near you. Having been decimated by big name brands pulling up...
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When we brainstorm about making Bridge better, we want to turn over every stone. We explore many avenues, from increasing collaboration to lowering product prices to enhancing marketing. What if an improvement was right in front of us—constant to all of these concepts? Regardless of what feature we offer, there is one constant: navigation. Navigation is fundamental to allowing members to easily find what they need—and discover what they didn’t know they needed.
While drinking Athletic, a non-alcoholic (fake!) beer, I noticed that its box proclaims that it gives back 2% to local trails. I love walking trails, and I thought: the next time I venture to have a sober night, I’ll pick up another box of Athletic. (Thanks, Athletic, for giving out $2.5m in trail grants.) Warby Parker gives a pair of eyeglasses for each pair bought (they've given 10m pairs!), while Bombas does this for socks. Bookshop.org gives a percent back to small ...
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Ronald Reagan said, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” Reaganomics usually refers to tax cuts and trickle down economics, yet I propose that we take the Gipper’s quote and ask: How can simplicity contribute to a business's success?
When we share what leading companies do, we can often skip an explanation and sum it up in a brief sentence. Examples:
Bridge has something that every store needs, but doesn’t really want: product data. We get stores to trust us that they need our product data for 64,000 products from 109 brands. They really don’t want the data—they want the sales from it. The data itself is worthless, but the sales from it are invaluable. Do you know who also has this issue? Funeral directors. Last week's Wall Street Journal shares that mortuaries are leveraging bonsai trees, setting up bouncy castles, ...
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You’ve likely had a vodka-Red Bull cocktail in your lifetime, which was followed by a hangover for you—but helped drink co-founder Dietrich Mateschitz amass a $20b fortune. Mateschitz, who passed away last week at the age of 78, discovered the drink in the 1980s in Thailand and built it into a global brand. He promoted Red Bull, whose name is a translation of the drink’s Thai name "Krating Daeng,” via a variety of clever marketing initiatives. In the early 2000s, I ...
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Google is often considered the first stop when searching for information. Looking for a product? You'll likely head to Amazon.com, where due to its 350m product listings, 25% of purchases reportedly start. Facebook will be your go-to for finding friends and family due to its 2b profiles of people. Airbnb lets you search 5.6m places to stay. These businesses are likely your choice because people want a massive selection when conducting a search. Many of the world's most ...
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In her new book ‘Quit,' Annie Duke shares that the best poker players only play 25% of the hands they are dealt, whereas others play 50%. Ms. Duke talks with Stewart Butterfield, the founder of a few startups, most recently Slack (which is an acronym, which I didn’t know). Slack wouldn’t have been born if Mr. Butterfield didn’t drop a video game company to start Slack. Likewise for Twitter which was born out of the failed blogging company Odeo. Ms. Duke's lesson: winners ...
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Scott Galloway, the NYU business professor and firebrand, pens a weekly, attention-grabbing article about business trends. In last week’s post, he noted the rise of the attention economy. (...Yes, my post is an attention-seeker writing about an attention-seeker writing about attention.) Comparing our current economy to those of the past, Mr. Galloway notes that today’s oil is time. He tracks the growth of digital companies like Netflix, Microsoft, Facebook, and TikTok that...
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Today’s Gen Z gift registrants want to do everything online, often on their iPhone 14. They want to start a registry, add products, remove products, edit quantities, and view purchases. They don't want to call the store to do this.
In the adoption of digital tools, another trend is also at play: female shoppers are busier than before. Today, more women graduate from college than men. Women are increasingly doctors, CEOs, and world leaders. (Italy just welcomed its ...
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In the early 2000s, the board game Cranium became a hit. The game combined elements of Scrabble and Pictionary with the goal of helping more people enjoy playing a game. Richard Tait, who created Cranium and sold it to Hasbro in 2008 for $77.5m, passed away in July. Like Mr. Tait, I had been a paperboy, but he went beyond what I ever offered: he came up with a new service that sold breakfast sandwiches along his newspaper route. He increased profits and made customers happier. ...
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